Award draws people with a tale to tell

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One evening a little over 10 years ago the bibliophile Geoffrey
Cains was having dinner with two of Australia's leading poets, Tom
Shapcott and Peter Skrzynecki, when the talk turned not to poetry,
as one might have thought, but to biography.

The three observed that biographical writing was thriving in
Australia - and that the reading public's appetite for personal
memoir, full literary or historical biography was almost
insatiable. Biography was the genre du jour, there was no doubt
about it.

Perhaps the approaching millennium had shaken the nation's
collective soul a little, with its accompanying sense of time
passing and times changing. Finding out how other people have lived
their lives can be both comforting and inspirational.

The diners felt there ought to be some kind of award to
acknowledge the fervid activity in this corner of Australian
writing.

The philanthropic Cains was much taken with the idea and, in
1996, established a biennial award for biographical writing,
generously endowing it with prize money of $12,500.

The National Biography Award was born: a prize that quickly made
its mark on the literary landscape in the years that followed as
one of Australia's more prestigious gongs, with its own
idiosyncratic character and objectives.

It proved so popular that in 2002 Cains switched it from a
biennial award to an annual prize, and last year increased the
prize money to $15,000.

The inaugural prize was awarded to the Melbourne writer Abraham
Biderman for his self-published memoir, The World of My
Past, an account of his Holocaust experiences and survival.

Biderman's win signalled two things about the new prize: it is
rare for a self-published work to receive any kind of
acknowledgement in the literary world, let alone take out a
literary award. In choosing Biderman's book, the judges were
signalling it was the quality of the writing that mattered, and
that was all that was going to matter.

Biderman's win also signalled that personal memoir was as
important a form in biographical writing as the more conventional
autobiographical/biographical structures the genre usually
takes.

Roberta Sykes's memoir, Snake's Cradle, the next winner,
and Mandy Sayer's Dreamtime Alice, a joint winner the
following award-year with Graham Robb's biography of Caravaggio,
M, both reinforced this perception.

In fact, memoir and autobiography continue to hold their own in
the prize. This year, for example, all five books short-listed are
autobiographical, some definitely more memoir than conventional
autobiography, such as Gaylene Perry's intensely focused
Midnight Water and Robert Hillman's memory-scape The Boy
in the Green Suit. The others - Robert Adamson's Inside
Out, Li Cunxin's Mao's Last Dancer and Peter
Skrzynecki's Sparrow Garden - are closer in style to
straight autobiography. The presence of the poet Skrzynecki on the
short list for what is now a highly regarded prize for prose
writing is not without irony.

What is even more striking about this year's crop is that
autobiography in all its shapes and sizes dominated all the entries
submitted.

Of the 50 or so books entered, nearly 40 were autobiography. As
one of the judges, Edmund Campion, says "the overall impression is
that there is a floodtide of autobiography being written in
Australia today".

"It's clear that people feel a need to hand on their stories to
the children of their grandchildren and beyond," Campion says.
"Family history has been a growth industry since the 1988
bicentenary. It has now gone to another level, when people are
writing their own histories."

Another judge, Gerard Windsor, concurs.

"There were only three works submitted you could say were the
traditional, scholarly type of biography," Windsor says. "There
were lots of other biographies, but they were more commercially
oriented books than serious books, you know, biographies of sports
people and that sort of thing."

The award's co-ordinator, the writer and historian Stephen
Martin, said he "didn't think it is a reflection on the standard of
biographical writing that the short list is all autobiography or
memoirs".

"I think it comes from the fact that we are just overwhelmed
with memoirs, people are wanting to write their memoirs today for
all sorts of reasons."

Martin says there were some "very earnest biographies"
submitted, and some very worthwhile academic biographies which
didn't quite make it "because Geoffrey Cains wants to enhance the
writing and reading of biography, so it is literary biography he
wants to support".

"But having said that, the Strehlow book [Broken Song: T.G.H.
Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession by Barry Hill] won last
year, and that was a work of intense scholarship and magnificently,
beautifully written. So it really comes down to that, in the end:
the writing, good writing."

The 2005 National Biography Award will be announced at the State
Library of NSW next Wednesday.